Mediation
Circa 2016—2025
Compiled in 2025
Photography (Colour), Text
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We stack ourselves into Tetris blocks along the side of roads. A jumbled mishmash of humanity. My ceiling’s your floor. Between us are thin walls—physical and psychic—scratched by use, marked by the week’s grime. We share communal rubbish bins, lifts, maintenance notices, and advisories reminding us not to spit in the lift or throw rubbish out the window, lest it inconvenience others or cause injury below.
Soon, I’ll have been in Hong Kong for ten years. I smile at the thought. The smile is returned by a beautiful woman over spaghetti, a billboard across the street. She’s telling me to ‘Live Italian. Live with passion.’ Being half Neapolitan, I make a promise to try to meet her halfway. I don’t want to let the team down.
People describe Italy as an open-air museum, un museo all’aperto. But isn’t the same true anywhere? Places wear their identities differently. Some preserve marble ruins. Others archive themselves in red, white, and blue plastic wrapping, greasy laminated menus, and flyers pasted to shuttered shopfronts.
These are the city’s annotations—reminders that we live in proximity, even if we rarely speak. I used to think of colour as something declarative, even difficult. But here, it feels quieter. Beneath the brightness, I see layers of exposure, wear, repetition. Colour marks time differently from monochrome. It holds on longer than we do, like adhesive residue on the inside of a lift.
These images aren’t looking for resolution. They sit with noise—visual, spatial, social. Tuned to a frequency where the city mediates between materials, bodies, and boundaries.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter where you go. The stories of a place don’t sit still. They shift, detach, reattach, peel off, emigrate, or are eaten for lunch. They live among us in impermanence.
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